On its first appearance in 1890, The Kreutzer Sonata, by Leo Tolstoy, made an instantaneous sensation and was for a long time the most talked of work of the period. Today it may be said to be practically dead. The lay reading public saw in it a marvelous portrayal of murder based on jealousy, growing out of the incompatibility in married life of two people; of whom no doubt the man was psychotic, as his acquittal by court on the grounds of “insanity”, proved. Yet, it is doubtful whether a lay reader, though feeling there might be something wrong with the man, could really point to anything definite in the man's make-up that would establish his illness. The whole setting as portrayed by the author was such as to give at least an apparent justification for the murder, and certainly no one in those days and perhaps even in our day, would regard all jealousy as pathological, and murder as a result of jealousy as entirely unjustified, since such murders are a common, almost everyday, occurrence.